From the Boing Boing Shop

Popular Posts

Follow Us

Following on the hugely successful publications of books one and two, Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan have launched a crowdfunding campaign for a third volume, collecting the excellent sex advice, erotica, and reviews from their brilliant webcomic.
Read the rest

In What We Buy When We "Buy Now", a paper forthcoming in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, respected copyright scholars Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle report on an experiment they set up to test what people clicking the "buy now" button on stores selling digital things (ebooks, games, music, videos, etc) think they get for their money -- it's not what they think.
Read the rest

In Germany, media that can make or store copies (drives, copiers, blank optical discs) is subject to a "private copying levy" that is meant to compensate rightsholders for the works that will be copied to it (in return, the levy confers a limited right to make those copies to the purchaser).
Read the rest

Between 120 and 150 IT workers will be fired from the McClatchy newspaper syndicate (Scramento Bee, Miami Herald, etc), after they have trained IT contractors from India's Wipro to do their jobs.
Read the rest

Publishing is in a weird place: ebook sales are stagnating; publishing has shrunk to five major publishers; libraries and publishers are at each others' throats over ebook pricing; and major writers' groups are up in arms over ebook royalties, and, of course, we only have one major book retailer left -- what is to be done?
Read the rest

Chris writes, "After a recent Kobo software upgrade, a number of Kobo customers have reported losing e-books from their libraries--notably, e-books that had been transferred to Kobo from their Sony Reader libraries when Sony left the consumer e-book business. One customer reported missing 460 e-books, and the only way to get them back in her library would be to search and re-add them one at a time! Customers who downloaded their e-books and illegally broke the DRM don't have this problem, of course."
Read the rest

Jenise writes, "Dreaming Robot Press is a teensy little publisher in New Mexico trying to fill a much-needed niche: they publish science fiction for children. In particular, they publish the Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, an annual anthology of SF short stories, most of which are for middle grades readers written by such luminaries as Nancy Kress and Beth Cato."
Read the rest

Brave is a new experimental browser from Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla. It comes with a built-in ad-blocker that only blocks third party ads, and replaces them with non-tracking ads from its own inventory, whose revenue is then shared with publishers and users, on better terms than most ad networks give.
Read the rest

Surveillance capitalism continues to astound and confound: as Facebook has turned into the traffic-factory life-support for ad-supported media -- and as Facebook profits from those companies by charging for "access" to their own followers -- the amount of personal sharing on Facebook is dropping off sharply.
Read the rest

Chris writes, "I bought my first e-book in 1998, before my e-reading hardware had even arrived yet. Yesterday I discovered that Barnes & Noble has effectively stolen that book from me, mistakenly replacing it it in my Nook library with another title I never bought."
Read the rest

Mark Marino writes, "Kick your Norton Anthology to the curb, and check out the latest collection of digitally born literature. Published by the Electronic Literature Organization, the collection contains 114 works from 26 countries in 12 languages. The Electronic Literature Collection, vol. 3 offers a glimpse at just how wide the world of digital literature has become, including a diverse array of works, from Twitter bots to poem generators to Twine tales to poetic apps.
Read the rest

My publisher, Tor Books -- the largest sf/f publisher in the world, a division of Macmillan -- is hiring two editorial assistants, one to work for my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden (as well as editors Miriam Weinberg and Jen Gunnels) and the other to work for Liz Gorinsky and on Seven Seas, a manga imprint. (via Making Light)
Read the rest